Jailbreak

Cydia

Jay Freeman (aka Saurik), author of Cydia and WinterBoard, Friday released Cycorder (website not REALLY there yet. ), a FREE native iPhone video recorder application. The release comes hot on the tails of DreamCatcher's 2.x release of their $19.95 iPhone Video Recorder software, and is superior in many aspects.

Before, I get into the details, here's a sample video recorded with Cycorder.

[ame]http://saurik.cachefly.net/cycorder.mov[/ame]

Quality on the videos is much higher than iPhone Video Recorder's movies, due to Saurik's use of MJPEG compression - the same compression used in the majority of point and shoot digital camera's with video support. Oh, and there is no waiting 3 times as long as your video length after you record before the video compresses and lets you watch it (as Showtime did, in 1.x firmwares - its not yet out for 2.x iPhones) - when you finish recording a video with Cycorder, you can immediately play the video back.

The video playback list has a slick first-frame thumbnail shown for each video you've taken, vs just a listing of the time's of each video as competing video recorders have (MUCH easier to tell which video is which - if you record several videos in an evening or day, the times really don't help you much at all later).

Videos are recorded at 384x288, a 4x3 aspect ratio. Depending on how well lit the area is, videos are recorded at between 6-15 fps. Saurik notes that the large variance of fps is due to the iPhone camera, which when video is recorded is basically taking pictures as fast as it can and when you take those photos the camera has to open its shutter, let in the light that makes up the photo, and close the shutter. The less light, the longer it takes to do that. So, better lighting equals higher quality fps, and therefore smoother videos.

The UI is done in landscape mode, and is extremely simple and easy to use - press the large center button on the right (bottom if the iPhone is held vertically) to record/stop recording, and press the small arrow to open up your playback list. Saurik mentioned he's looking at ways to even have the videos show up in your iPod Videos list once recorded in Cycorder.

Update!!!! Cycorder now includes audio

Cycorder can be downloaded now from Cydia (its on the Featured Packages list on the front page of Cydia, or in the Multimedia section. I'd definitely recommend it - the video quality is the best out there, and audio will be included shortly.